Bugs Bunny, the linchpin of the Looney Tunes, has been called everything from
"classic" to "perennial" to "an American institution" to "one of our national
heroes"--and "wascally wabbit," "long-eared galoot," and a lot of other things
besides! But most of us just like to call him Bugs.

Now he's starring in Space Jam, Warner Bros.' first original
feature film graced by Bugs in a leading role--opposite Michael Jordan, no less!
Producer Ivan Reitman and director Joe Pytka head a team of filmmakers
including producers Joe Medjuck and Daniel Goldberg, executive producers Ken
Ross and David Falk, and screenwriters Leo Benvenuti & Steve Rudnick and
Timothy Harris & Herschel Weingrod to bring this ambitious and
precedent-setting project to life. Starring with Bugs and Michael Jordan are
Wayne Knight, Theresa Randle and the voice of Danny DeVito.

Heading the bill in Space Jam with one of the sports world's most
entertaining players is a natural opportunity for the venerable Warner Bros.
character. After all, Bugs was voted the most popular in the entire
short-subject field in the United States and Canada for the year 1945, and then
stayed in the Number One spot for the next 16 years straight. Today, in 1996,
Bugs continues to draw a crowd--in fact, a recent survey showed him to be the
most popular animated character in the world!

When Bugs' classic cartoons were being made and regularly released to theaters
in the 1940s and 1950s, it was his stardom in short subjects that skyrocketed
his studio to prominence in the animation field.

Part of Bugs' great achievement had been to establish a strong personality who
can exist for 7 minutes at a time, show us a facet of his personality,
disappear for weeks, months, maybe years at a time, then reappear and still be
recognizeable and entertaining. His possibilities were not exhausted by any
single episode.

The trick was not to sustain seven minutes, but to live for 50 years. And once
you've sustained 56 years of amazing popularity with one generation after
another all over the world, it's hardly likely you're going to have much
trouble sustaining a 90 minute feature.

Michael Maltese, one of Bugs' writers, remembered that in the old days, a
theater's marquee had to say no more than "2 Bugs Bunny Cartoons" for people to
plunk their money down--forgetting what features or other short subjects were
playing, forgetting that the "2 Bugs Bunny Cartoons" would be over in 15
minutes--and, most of all, forgetting their troubles. "After a while, Bugs
Bunny was so well loved by the audience that he could do no wrong," said
Maltese. "They loved the rabbit, and what he stood for."

Friz Freleng, one of the leading directors of Bugs' classic shorts, once
remarked, "The cocky characters, for some reason, the public seems to like.
They don't like those kinds of people in real life." Mel Blanc, who first
provided The Rabbit's voice, believed that "Bugs Bunny appeals to the rebel in
all of us. Everybody loves a winner, and Bugs Bunny always wins."

There's a moment in A Hare Grows in Manhattan when Bugs dives into a
manhole to escape the bulldog pursuing him, and between the time the dog leaps
in the air and the time he reaches the manhole, Bugs has managed to resurface,
grab the manhole cover, and pull it into place--turning the dog's face into
something resembling a waffle. It's a simple enough gag, but the point is that
there is a look of such total delight on Bugs' face as he performs the
act, that he turns the whole business into something else altogether, a
conflict of viewpoints rather than a physical conflict between two animals.

Bugs is Puck reborn; he enjoys the scrapes he gets into because he
knows he'll win eventually. This goes a long way toward making him the
irresistible character he is: he holds out the possibility that the Battle is
winnable, that we can vanquish the foe and have fun doing it, that every
setback can become another challenge, another excuse for high spirits.

This is possibly the critical factor of what we love about Bugs: that he will
not only make us laugh but make us feel victorious and triumphant. There are
heroes and there are comedians; rarely do the two meet. This made him a
difficult character to write for, but it's what gave him that special spark
that made him the phenomenon that he has been.

From the time he first asked Elmer Fudd "What's up, Doc?" right up to the
release of Space Jam, Bugs has been both sophisticated and naive,
innocent and guilty, Child of Nature and Street-Tough Smart Guy, fool and hero,
one of the most rounded and all-around characters in the history of film, a
multi-faceted gem.

A Wild Hare and Beyond

The hardy hare has been delighting fans of every age, nationality, and
persuasion for longer than the majority of his youthful fans probably realize.
Most of the current crop of screen heroes were not even born when Bugs first
rose casually from his rabbit hole, chewing on a carrot, peering down the
barrel of a gun, and cracking a cool "Eh-h-h-h-What's up. Doc?" out of one
corner of his mouth, in a cartoon called A Wild Hare, directed by Tex
Avery and released by Warner Bros. in July of 1940.

Bugs, like most characters, inspires that insistent question, "Who created
him?" A simple answer is expected. But no simple answer works.

The clearest family line reaches back to Tex Avery, who gave The Rabbit his
famous personality. When asked how Bugs came into being, the soft-spoken Texan
was laconic. "Oh," he said, "it just came out of a cartoon. We decided he was
going to be a smartaleck rabbit, but casual about it, and his opening line in
the very first one was `Eh, what's up, Doc?' And, gee, it floored `em! They
expected the rabbit to scream, or anything but make a casual remark--here's a
guy with a gun in his face! It got such a laugh that we said, `Boy, we'll do
that every chance we get.' It became a series of `What's up, Docs?'."

"We didn't feel that we had anything until we got it on the screen and it got
quite a few laughs," Avery recalled. "When we saw that on the screen, we knew
we had a hit character," Freleng remembered. "He was the most timid of
animals, yet he had courage and brashness. The whole gimmick was a rabbit so
cocky that he wasn't afraid of a guy with a gun who was hunting him."

But the new character had no name at first. Jack Rabbit, or Jack E. Rabbit,
was the personal choice of Avery himself, since he had spent so much time
hunting jackrabbits and since "I thought it would please my Texas friends."

But another of the Warner cartoon directors, Ben Hardaway, whose nickname was
"Bugs," had already asked designer Charlie Thorsen to create a rabbit for an
earlier cartoon, and when Thorsen had submitted the model sheet, he'd labeled
it "Bugs' Bunny." Now, with this model sheet circulating the studio, and with
a search for a good name underway, publicist Rose Horsely jumped on the label
"Bugs Bunny" as "so cute!"

But Horsely had the ear of Leon Schlesinger, who produced the cartoons for
Warner Bros. Schlesinger thought a moment, then said, "O.K. Bugs Bunny.
We'll go with it."

"We were always very proud of what we were doing there," says Phil Monroe, one
of the Warner animators. "We thought our pictures were funnier than anybody
else's. We were all geared for humor--the animators would be asked to submit
gags for pictures, and a lot of them were used." A new style was developing:
most of it was Avery's doing, most of it was taking place right there at Warner
Bros., and most of it was focused on The Rabbit.

Finally the directors realized you couldn't look down on this character,
the way you could with most cartoon clowns. You could only look up to
him. It was at that point that Bugs came to life, individually, for each of
the directors at Warner Bros., and, better than that, became a focal point for
everything they saw as the best in themselves.

Almost as soon as they started working with the character, the Bob Clampett
unit, with McKimson in the lead, started giving Bugs less of an oval shape than
the first model sheets called for, and his face began to look less ratlike.
Then they started structuring the nose differently, and the teeth were
naturally anchored to the same bone structure, in a more appealing facial
design. By the time Clampett made Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid in 1942, he
had arrived at what we might call the Classic Bugs Bunny. By late 1944 the
same design was reaching the screen in the cartoons of the other units. Once
Freleng made Stage Door Cartoon, released near the end of that year, the
McKimson look was universal.

"Bugs was gradually becoming a more complex character," Chuck Jones remembers.
"The writers and directors were all beginning to realize that we had the
potential of a brilliant and lasting star on our hands, a rambunctious,
unbridled, and often balky baby Bugs that needed now to grow, to smooth out;
we must find out how to harness that energy without destroying the spirit and
how to guide the child without steering it. Bugs changed because he had to,
not because we were brilliant."

Bugs, madder than the March Hare and saner than Alice, knows he's in a cartoon.
He always had a trick, and he always had the prop that was necessary to pull of
that trick. Whatever it was--a sledgehammer, a stick of dynamite, an anvil, a
cannon--he needed it, he got it? Where did it come from? Nobody wanted to
know, they just wanted to see him pull off his fast one.

Bugs was the cartoon version of the loud-mouthed but loveable Brooklynese
smart-aleck who turns up in the cockpit, in the barracks, or on the battlefield
in every World War II movie, as inevitable as the flag, and, apparently, just
as effective in rallying the spirits of a beleaguered nation. The idea that
the battle was winnable was a very popular one during World War II.

"It was during those war years...that the Bugs Bunny cartoons...passed Disney
and MGM for the first time to become the Number One short subject," Bob
Clampett recalled.

The studio received an offer from the Utah Celery Company of Salt Lake City to
keep all staffers well supplied with their product if Bugs would only switch
from carrots to their crunchy greens. Later the Broccoli Institute of America
strongly urged The Bunny to sample their product once in a while. It never
happened. Mel Blanc would have been happy to switch to any of these
vegetables, since carrots made his throat muscles tighten and the words
couldn't come out, but it was no go. Carrots were Bugs' trademark. The only
concession they ever made was to move the carrot-crunching sounds and dialog to
the last spot in the recording session.

In the 1950s, with the post-war Baby Boom transforming his previous audience
from rowdy kids in uniform to mature adults with responsibilities, Bugs found
his new audience extended to include those "responsibilities." The nation was
filling its nurseries and schools to capacity with children, and they were all
becoming Bugs Bunny fans.

By 1957 Bugs' perennial popularity had become as much a bewilderment as a
source of pride. The theatrical short subject market had gone through a series
of drastic changes, Bugs' contemporaries from the early `40s had largely faded
from the scene, even Disney had phased out the one-reel cartoon, and television
was posing new threats every year. The world of 1940 was becoming history.